London-based Doubleword, a self-hosted inference platform for enterprises, today announced a €10.6 million Series A funding round in order to help enterprises own & control their AI by solving the inference problem.
The funding round was led by Dawn Capital. Doubleword also counts K5 Tokyo Black as an investor alongside leading AI entrepreneurs as angel investors, including Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue and Dataiku CEO Florian Douetteau.
Meryem Arik, Co-founder and CEO of Doubleword, said: “Our customers want to build AI-powered applications—not AI infrastructure. We eliminate the heavy lifting of inference at scale so they can go from idea to production faster, without racking up technical debt. We ensure that our customers can deploy any AI model with a single click, while always having the latest models and hardware supported – and without being wedded to a single model provider.
“With this funding, we’ll continue to grow our team globally and invest in our platform to solve even more of the inference problem for our customers.”
Founded in 2021, the UK-based company – formerly TitanML – is solving one of the biggest barriers to large-scale enterprise AI adoption: self-hosted inference. Inference is where AI delivers real-world value — from answering questions to generating images, it transforms models into business outcomes.
Founded pre-ChatGPT by Meryem Arik (CEO), Dr Jamie Dborin (CSO), and Dr Fergus Finn (CTO). During their postdoctoral research at UCL, Jamie and Fergus realised techniques used in their quantum machine learning model compression were also well placed to improve AI inference performance.
The UK’s Secretary of State for Science, Innovation, and Technology Peter Kyle said: “AI will help us to deliver growth for our economy and new opportunities for people up and down the country, so it’s vital businesses have the confidence to adopt and realise its potential. Doubleword’s work is helping set the standard for how companies can do exactly that – adopting AI quickly and efficiently so they can realise their ambitions and allow their workers and customers to thrive in the age of AI.
“This is yet another illustration not just of how British-born tech expertise is tapping into AI to help give businesses the world over a unique point of difference, but in the steps we’ve taken to make our tech sector a true global magnet for innovation and investment.”
As AI adoption grows, inference has become mission-critical — a capability enterprises must own and control — driving a shift toward self-hosted inference.
Self-hosting, however, brings with it the task of building and maintaining performant, scalable inference infrastructure. As a result, many teams find themselves trapped in an ongoing cycle of assembling tools, hunting for specialised talent, and continually updating their infrastructure to keep pace.
This is where Doubleword looks to come in. They have already scaled into the US and secured partnerships with Snowflake and Dataiku.
“Enterprises creating specific business-critical AI would gladly self-host, if ‘expertise’ and ‘cost’ didn’t sound like double trouble,” said Florian Douetteau, CEO at Dataiku. “Doubleword flips the script, making self-hosting effortless and reshaping the market for enterprise customers.”
Doubleword’s end-to-end solution reportedly enables enterprises to self-host AI models—open-source, proprietary, or fine-tuned—without having to build, maintain, or optimise complex infrastructure. Doubleword looks to empower enterprises to:
Deploy 1 or 1000 models in their environment effortlessly, with one-click private deployment of any open-source, domain-specific, or custom model
Manage all their deployments in one place, acting as the unified control layer across cloud and on-prem deployments with analytics, logs & alerts built in
Scale AI on their terms, with proprietary inference optimisation research that optimises your GPU research, and dynamic infrastructure that is built to flex with your roadmap, not dictate it
Haakon Overli, General Partner at Dawn Capital, addeed: “Doubleword is the most exciting startup in this space, and we’re extremely excited to be supporting Meryem, Jamie, Fergus and the team as they take the company to the next level. The team has a market-leading product, and has proven they can flawlessly execute to deliver for global customers. They are scaling a product that businesses need at the right time, with the right expertise.”
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2025/05/british-startup-doubleword-raises-e10-6-million-to-make-self-hosted-ai-inference-effortless-for-enterprises/
